New York Actionist

QUICK ART MARKET PREDICTION

2007-09-10T23:02:00.000-05:00

Everything will stay the same - except even more painting . . .

Jonas Mekas @ PS1, Queens, NY

2007-04-14T15:32:00.000-05:00

Currently up at PS1, is an exhitibiton of film/video work by Jonas Mekas entitled - The Beauty of Friends Being Together Quartet - featuring over 40 films covering Mekas entire hermetical ouerve.

Mekas' exhibtiion upon entering the space is a very overwhelming electric experience, with all the films/videos on monitors continuously looping, stills from other selected work covering the walls and a sinlge projected film in the adjacent room humming, flickering and buzzing.

As a neophyte to much of Mekas' work and viewing the exhibtion piece by piece, the work projected out onto me such a profoundly intimate and universal feeling of a collective data bank of a life lived - shared moments with friends and family offered to voyeuristic eyes. Mekas' work in the exhibitoin covered many subjects of his New York life - friends hanging out over the city, 9/11, movies being made, shared dinners, concerts, parties, fooling around at home, playing in the streets. When collected, these elements of uniqueness of imagery and his high impact and fast editing style coalese into a bigger portrait of Mekas' life as experienced in relationships, his love of his friends and of his city. Celebrity interludes and moments captured, including Warhol, the Velvet Underground, Naim June Pak, Martin Scorsese, Patti Smith and others seemed personal instead of awed, adding nuance to projected images of who these people are instead of adding to their celeb mystique.

What collects within this autonomous monument to himself is not a post-scripted concern over his own legacy but to that of experienced shared to celebrate our existance as humans, the mundane and austere side by side in perfect proportion to what life gives at any moment; a cinema of a collected body of fate.

Mekas' images, usually raw and constantly shifting, exscape the concerns of narrative and aesthetic cinema for a more honest and soulful documentary of imaged experience, becoming more of an art work within its expressive whole rather than segments of film reels of a documentary.

Press Release:

Jonas Mekas: The Beauty of Friends Being Together Quartet
February 11 - April 23, 2007

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center is pleased to announce Jonas Mekas: The Beauty of Friends Being Together Quartet, an exhibition comprised of films and film stills by the celebrated artist. Mekas is considered an inventor of Diarist Cinema – an intimate first-person collision of poetry, fiction, documentary, and formal experimentation through which any autobiographical themes can be explored – and is also renowned for his extensive film archive. Such seminal and varied components of his oeuvre will be intimately presented in the Mini-Kunsthalle from February 11 through April 23, 2007.

Drawing on thousands of hours of film footage, from spontaneous events and happenings of everyday life to the most intimate sequences of his personal relationships with friends from various times and places in New York City and beyond, this exhibition features for the first time the multi-channel installation “Four Quartets”: The Destruction Quartet; The Education of Sebastian, or Egypt Regained; Farewell to SoHo; and Martin Scorsese: An American Filmmaker at Work. Also on view will be The Sixties Quartet including Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol, Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas, To John and Yoko with Love, and This Side of Paradise.

In addition to the film presentation, the exhibition also includes 40 portraits of friends selected from individual film frames, 40 stills from footage of New York City, and his recent 40 films made as an introduction for the podcast project 365 Films – one sequence shot each day of the year (also available on www.jonasmekas.com).

Jonas Mekas (born December 23, 1922; Semeniškiai, near Biržai, Lithuania) is a filmmaker, poet, editor, and curator who has often been called The Godfather of American avant-garde cinema. He is the founder of the Anthology Film Archives, The Film Makers Cooperative, and Film Culture magazine. Mekas started the “Movie Journal” column for the Village Voice in 1958 and remained a film critic at the publication until 1978. He is best known for his diary films such as Walden (1969), Lost, Lost, Lost (1975), Reminiscences of a Voyage to Lithuania (1972), and Zefiro Torna (1992). In 2001, he released a five-hour diary film entitled As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, assembled by hand from an archive comprising fifty years-worth of recordings of his life.

Vik Muniz @ PS1, Queens, NY

2007-04-06T20:36:00.000-05:00

Up at PS1 in Long Island City in Queens is a mini-retrospective of the photography and paper works of Vik Muniz.

Being familiar with his photographs of iconic art images made in chocolate syrup over the years, primarily, I had no driving impulse to see the exhibit, but as the rest of PS1 was uninspiring the weekend I went, so anything was available in my mind for further exploration or otherwise.

However, when entering the exhibit, I was greeted by two images of such depth and iconic inventiveness that they immediately changed my mind about viewing Muniz's work. As seen above, the images are of carefully arranged junk within a studio that are in homage to art history's Narcissus and Saturn Eating His Children. What is so striking about the works is the absolute power in which Muniz has produced these images, displacing perspectives, drawing connections between materials and constructed images, and introducing true homage and honor into a practice seemingly flippant towards its subjects.

Within the syrup works, technique and concept ruled the image to the point where nothing was left for the viewer to see outside of a cliched "iconic" art history reference, but as evidenced in these newer works, Muniz has brought the viewer into an ever changing experience of persception and planes, treating the subjects with a vastly mature palette and purpose. The viewer can now go into the meat of the work, exploring lines, textures, materials, and structure and then be able to pull away and appreciate the perspective difference which introduces an art reference that for once does not weaken or lessen the work. Such iconographic elements pull this work beyond everthing else installed within the exhibition and reinforce its own iconography wihtin his own work, leaving other previous attempts cold and conceptually overdone.

What really turns on in these images is the violence and life which conjures the visual plane, the earthy rusted browns and blacks across the landscape, the tense lines and broken edges of amassed forgotten objects competeing with privilaged negative space, and the glimmers of bright plastic color escaping the earthly carnage. The old dirty trash is pulled together precisely and EFFECTIVELY arranged to create such beauty and life and violence within Ode to Saturn, an image seemingly forever actively taking place while standing still. The pull of both the close/far bodies/object bodies within my minds eye, especially in Ode to Saturn, brings an unshakeable sense of awe; a witnessing of aura within the work.

One of the best things about art in all its expressions is its never-ending capacity to transform all pre-conceived notions and transcend pretense to really connect within one a force of life and truth especially when one least expects it.

Pressure + Movement + Light: Naoki Iwakawa + Shige Moriya @ Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn, NY

2007-03-31T10:55:00.000-05:00

On March 24, I had the pleasure of performing with Naoki Iwakawa and Shige Moriya of CAVE Gallery at Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, NY and was a witness to their highly energized perfromance works once again.

Naoki Iwakawa live is an action painter and was joined by Blake Fleming on drums to provide musical accompyment and another friend to provide live film projection onto the performance area. As the music began, Iwakawa started preparing the wall space with splashes from one of his many bowls of paint. Throwing, hurling and dumping paint onto the wall, Iwakawa gained intensity in concurrance with the drums to the point of dropping all his materials and attaching a blindfold around his head. Now with film projecting, Iwakawa blindly attacked the wall, attempting to paint with black the remains of a human form with his mind. After repeated assaults at the wall, Iwakawa removed his blindfold and began attaching paper and new paint at a furious pace to the wall, drowning the paper in lighter fluid and then setting his work on fire as he fell to the ground. With the paper burning above him on the wall, Iwakawa remained prone on the floor as the fire burned itself out, signalling the end of the performance.

Naoki Iwakawa has always been a strong performer over the times that I have seen him, which I must admit to be close to 10 by now, and that night was no exception. Often in collaboration, individual elements of each perfromers strength can get lost but Iwakawa and Fleming provided dualing amounts of power which challenged them to go further and further beyond into the trance like motions of each others actions. Iwakawa's touch for sensory exploration translated well beyond an intellectual conceit to exhilarating visceral experience and the induced environments from the drum patterns played into the psyche of an audiences manifestation of exploration through the performed actions. At its core, Iwakawa is in love with the physical act of painting and challenges himself to explore the mental and physical limits of visual and energy expression through these actions and marks upon the wall, emptying into impermanence as if answering the eternal void for just one moment.

Shige Moriya is a live video artist who uses projections and computer manipulation to produce live experiences of improvised enviroments often with musical accompyment. Moriya produced a space with multiple projections with the musical accompyment with Blake Fleming on drums, Petre Radu Scarufo on reeds, and Ninni Morgia on guitar. Beginning much like a concert, the lights dimmed, the projections began and the musicans began their improvised work. Channeling images of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, landscapes and ambient shapes and light, Moriya weaves images into and out of focus, constantly changing the environment throught the projected space, signalling beautiful abstraction and exploration of light and symbols. Concurrently the assembled musicians built and explored soundscapes, rising and falling throughout the video work, responding to the imagery projected and to their own collective energy, making a more free contribution as compared to Iwakawa's trance like performance.

Shige Moriya is also another performer I have literally seen countless times, and this performance was another exploration of how imagery in lighted improvised environments interact and relate into beautiful and sometimes unexpected outcomes with improvised music to alter a different set of senses. The predominant thing within the performance to me was the contrasted use of the Da Vinci Man and Moriya's own personal landscapes which seem to be exploring his questions between man and environment which have become more and more prominent within his recent work. Owing to more ambient strains of soundtracks, the music came in waves to the imagery often rising above ambient noise to powerful bursts of free noise. Within everything in the environment, a complete sense of sensory loss allowed sub-concious viewing of the entire performance, letting images and sound drift into and out of thinking, which leaves even a trained viewer with more impressionistic impressions of a performance rather than conculsive thought or feelings. Such results, I think, speak to Moriya's work who seeks to always ask questions, both experientally and formally.

From Press Release:

Hailing from Japan, Naoki Iwakawa is a painter who uses movement and intense action in his work. His unique style of live action painting incorporates elements from earlier action painters, possessing a dimension of physicality rarely seen, at times throwing his entire body against the paint-covered canvases. He collaborates with musicians and movement artists, adding even more layers to an already complex and engaging performance style.

Shige Moriya, originally from Japan, works as a live video-based performance artist. His projections are sculptural images made from the movements of light in the interactions with darkness. In all of Moriya’s art, he communicates a message of deep spirituality and the yearning to return to nature, searching for beauty and substance amidst the light and shadows he explores. Mesmerizing natural images seamlessly reflect onto the movements of water and cascade across the room, creating a total atmosphere of luminous depth and subtlety.

More Information: www.caveartpace.org , www.gracespace.multiply.com

Gerald Pryor - MASON TWINE / A BODY MEASURE @ Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn, NY

2007-03-29T10:42:00.000-05:00

On March 20, Gerald Pryor brought to Grace Exhibition Space his continuing series of performance entitled MASON TWINE / A BODY MEASURE, a performance that is a manifest of mason twine, the artist's body, definition of areas and red red paint.

Begining with a gutteral yell to announce his begining, Pryor and his assistant proceeded to cover the floor by adhering white roll paper with duct tape. With the floor space defined, Pryor position a chair within the center of the space and then proceeded to undress. Nude, Pryor began the measuring by first wrapping his genitals with yellow mason twine and then pink mason twine, making a makeshift thong with long streams coming ou the sides. After putting on new underwear, he proceeded to beinging measuring the space from his genitals, attaching streams of the twine to the columns. After calling for his assistant, he then attached her with twine to the chair within the space and then began to measure the rest of the performance space within relationiships to his body, his assistants body and then to the extent of the audience, literaly coating all the audience with a stream of twine to measure the entire performance situation. Reuring to the center of the performance space, Pryor slathered red paint over his torso while producing an aggravated moan and turned to embrace a nearby pillar, leaving an impression of his red torso. Pryor then announced that the performance was finished, palcing the measured twine upon the wall and thanking everyone for coming out. In addition, this performance was broadcast simultaneously on a wall with the help of a video camera.

As a viewer, I was left with many conflicted feelings towards what had just taken place. Pryor, when assertive, can be a towering presence capable of capturing attention with his actions or voice, but when performing menial tasks such as the setup of the space or directing an assistant during the perfromance, the tedium of his work overcomes the viewer. His proposition to measure within the terms of his body is an interesting premise to this work, but did not compete with the amount of empty space within and around his performance. I was left thinking about the posible exhaution of the lines that could be created wihtin the measurments of his body and the audience's body, but was only able to witness 5 or so measurements that were removed quickly after their completion. Perhaps providing an unecessary block to the audience was a later found self-tautology of rules for the performance, which directed most of his moves instead of giving somehting up to risk within the work. This assertion is a entirely personal preference as I find that some form of risk is always necessary within any artwork. Further adding to this block was this detailed description of the performance posted online (many of which points seem to have been left out of the final work):

"Mason Twine/A Body Measure alludes to the strand of mason twine that will be used in the performance, a chord historically used for measuring objects. The mason twine will be connected to the performer and to Grace Exhibition Space via four of its structural columns, drawn tight, and wrapped around four plastic bags of Styrofoam chips. At appointed times, the performer, covered in red paint, will crash into these bags, crushing and scattering the contents over the space. And the mason twine will be cut and gathered to create drawings on the wall, while live video feed will be projected during and after the completion of the performance, continuing to play throughout the remainder of the exhibition."

Now I could be completely wrong, but this sounds like a completely diffrernt performance than what the audience witnessed, so perhaps risk was taken in improvising the work, but the systems of rules and directions did not seem to imply as such.

MASON TWINE / A BODY MEASURE is a performance that worked wihtin its intelectual realms but quavered in its visual production. The drifting in and out of various set up and direction aspects reduced the ability for the work to flow and enrapture the attention that the piece had the ability to deliver. However, the ideas that permeate throughout the work sustain a level of interest that leaves one with these kind of considerations, long after the performance is over. Perhaps a longing for the possiblities of the work is the work's greatest testiment.

More Information: http://www.gracespace.multiply.com

Terrence Koh + Gordan Matta Clark @ Whitney Museum of American Art

2007-03-17T00:55:00.000-05:00

Currently up at the Whitney are two shows by two artists who touch upon performance issues in their work, Terrence Koh and Gordon Matta Clark.

Upon entering the museum, Koh's installation is immediately apparent. Bright white light is streaming from the gallery space on the main floor, and as one approaches the gallery, one can view, from a distance, the white room illuminated by a single projector light beaming out so intensely that direct viewing is impossible for many seconds. A transgressive assualt on the viewers senses, Koh's work is aggresive yet blandly minimal, confident in its power but impotent in its visual body. Unfamiliar with Koh's work in general, my only conclusions can be made from what I have seen and experienced as an active part of his installation, and within that it shows both precision in a techinal, "oh wow, that's so clean and arty" sense and laziness in the simple abuse of a viewer. What confuses the situation is that it is such a one trick pony that can simply be defused by the angle to which one approaches the light, but head on, it is an unmistakable experience, literally challenging the process of sight and leaving a viewer with spots for many minutes after viewing. This level of viewer approach to such a primal force is an interesting exploration of how a work's merits and weakness combine beyond that which normally informs a perception of an art work, what primal forces in the world draw one unconditionally as a viewer. This is also what I find to be the major weakness, the process of unmitigated intellectual response expounded only in one's head to symbolic ends, when it is simply a light in a room beamed at someone. So is this a cynical transgressive act aimed at intelluctual response to support its merit or a genuine experiential artwork that possess in real time an authority of actual physical transferrance?

On the Whitney's 4th Floor is a retrospective of the artist Gorden Matta Clark. Familiar with Matta Clark's work from many art history books and art magazines, I came into the exhibition expecting torn up and cut up houses, but arrived instead at an extremely impressive survey of a man obsessed with altering perspective through his invisioned means. Through videos, photogrpahs, drawing, house remnants, sculptures, and films, Matta Clark's work traces his very perfromance based work from simple conceptions to fully developed and realized houses that are both in reality and documented in visual perspectives that instill a human mark upon the unforgiving urban territory, marking through his body with tools ways in which seeing became a sculptural element within the world. The video and film portion was the most illuminating portion of the exhibition, highlighting the artist's method and achievement in real time, which is something lost on photographs that were alterations to produce the same perspective he saw within his own work. One can see the artist and his co-conspirators cutting, sawing, climbing, and investigating their sites and witness the actuallity of houses being split and walls being opened. These as a veiwer are much more accomplished than the remants of the houses displayed as sculpture, which although give a colored reference point and textural object to which the black and white photographs project, leave within me the feeling of debris or a performance remnant that carries none of the weight from the original work. Matta Clark's process of assembled photographs to document his work are often inspired and transcend on their own the spirit of the work, although his consistent use of the same scale can bring a sense of sameness over the crowed rooms filled with them. In additon to the photographs are some of Matta Clark's orginal sketches and drawing, which are good to compare his development wihtin his work, do not always provide a compelling formal example of his ideas. What remains most memorable after the viewing of his body of work is his distinct essence of what it is to be a human within the world, specifically the vitality of the human experience in the city, the constant clashes of and body and inhuman materials and how our relationships within this context can change with one's actions. One's thoughts and actions can change perspectives of the everyday and challenge perceptions of life or homes or a city within our own contribution to the world.

From the Whitney website:

Terence Koh

On view January 19, 2007 - May 27, 2007

For his first solo museum show in the United States, Terence Koh is creating a new installation for the Whitney's Lobby Gallery. In Koh's immersive, typically monochromatic environments -- in which minimalist and baroque aspects of his sensibility vie for dominance -- a seemingly unknown ritual is about to take place, where a sense of loss simultaneously suggests regeneration. From drifting powder silencing rooms, and constellations of cryptically linked objects that move from literally disjunctive realms (upstairs/downstairs, inside/outside, dark/light) as well as more conceptual ones, to pristine, perfectly crafted containers that become coffins for shattered glass and mirror, the glitter of black beads, burnt objects, residing within -- Koh's gestures evoke isolation and secrecy, but also protection and ecstasy.

Gordon Matta Clark

On view February 22, 2007 - June 3, 2007

During the brief but highly productive ten years that he worked as an artist, and even more so since his death, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) has exerted a powerful influence on artists and architects who know his work. This retrospective will bring together the breadth of his practice to reveal the unique beauty and radical nature of his punnings, plans, performances, and interventions evident in the many media in which he worked: the sculptural objects (most notably from building cuts), drawings, fims, photographs, notebooks, and documentary material.

More Information: www.whitney.org

FRANCIS O'SHAUGNESSY, SARAH LETOURNEAU & DAVID BOYLAN @ Grace Exhibtiion Space, Brooklyn, NY

2007-03-11T11:51:00.000-05:00

FRANCIS O'SHAUGNESSY (Montreal), SARAH LETOURNEAU (Quebec) & DAVID BOYLAN (NYC) - Since opening last autumn, Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, NY has been on the forefront of bringing together performance and other non-commercially oriented art forms to the public. This past Thursday, March 8, I stopped by to attend their latest performance night, featuring performances by 3 very different artists, but each having a common tread of using specifically everyday objects in "new" ways.

The first performance featured Sarah Letourneau of Chicoutimi, Canada.

Utilizing candles, lipstick, accapella singing, apples, red yarn and an unwritten book, Letourneau guided the audience through a seamingly personal work in which she extinguised a candle motif she had built, evocatively sang a song in French while smearing two lipstick stains on her ceeks, spelled out her dreams - literally in yarn - and then proceeded to drop apples all over them, smashing some with her feet and returing the seeds to the book from which her lipstick kisses were sealed. In this linear work, Latourneau succeded the most while retaining the evocative nature of her personal mystique, especially effective while she sang eloquently in French, her passion and tension within the song transcending the block of a different language being expressed to the audience. While commanding the space, Letourneau's use of very "perfromance" associated objects - i.e. the candles, the apples, lipstick - did tend to have a heavier handed feel that contrasted the personal nature that seemed to be an essential component to the performance. As a viewer, the less intimmate the objects of a performance are, the less intimate one can feel connected to oblects, especially when connected to an oblique personal drama that seeks to connect intimately with an audience. Despite the minor qualms, Letourneau, who is a student at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi, showed the promise of a developing performance artist who seeks to connect through personal mystiques.

The second performance of the night was by Francis O'Shaughnessy of Montreal/Chicoutimi, Canada.

Utilizing the same area within the space, O'Shaughnessy assembled obljects - plates on strings, eggs, a coffee caraft, a round sitting cushiion, two colors of tape, a picture frame with half of a fake (?) bird inside, and the other half of the fake (?) bird - on the floor and began a performance than combined more raw unfocused energy and on the spot improvising. Demarking a space on the floor with tape, O'Shaughnessy placed the framed bird in the space and proceeded to enact a memorial allegory between the lost bird and freedom, crushing eggs into the caraft, throwing plates against the wall from strings attached to his arms and chanting about freedom. At times intense, O'Shaughnessy lost momentum when techinical flubs prevented his evolving sense of what the linear would be, often having to break plates again after not doing so the first time or dropping egg shells into what was to be a caraft of just yolks. His reluctance to let things be showed a tentativeness that broke certain moments that could have been more transcendant. However, when he did let things flow into an entranced moment, the results were sublime. O'Shaughnessy is an advanced practitioner who knows how to perform, but can be palgued by the techinical moments in a performance like anyone else.

The final performance was by David Boylan of Brooklyn, NY.

Setting an unfortunate tone early on, Boylan presented a work that used a self-contained and movable bed/chair in which he depeneded on the entire audience to document and participate in the possiblities of his movable object, dictating to all his directions at all moments. As an audience member, invitations to join in the performance can be a welcome break from the wall of non-interaction that is expected by the performer and audience members equally and with respect to both. However, within minutes of beginning his work, Boylan's pretentious dictatorial began to irritate and wear on an audience who were mere pawns in a self-reflexive ego trip on control and release. To keep the options open to the uses of this object, the audience had to participate in posed positions on the bed/chair while also having to take pictures of the proceedings due to the technical limit of the automatic power shut off of the camera. Although fun for certain members of the audience, I was left cold and irrtiated as things proceeded with the constant dependence on the audience to either complete a pose, take a picture, turn on a cd player, help him move his bed/chair, or help him move his techinical setup ( a projector attacehd to teh camera so that the artist could see all the poses as he dictated them). Such dependence and eventual wear on an audience showed a massive undevelopment of a work, showing an inexperienced and lazy work element to the work that had more than one person becomming disinterested during it's 1 hour+ duration. Adding to this mix was a constant soundtrack of ironic rap music and techinical glitches that interrrupted the performance for 10 minutes at a time. It was an unfortunate end to an ortherwise good performance night of three very different indiviuals.

Grace Exhibition Space is a great addition to the Brooklyn Art World and presents efforts with far more balls than most Williamsburg Galleries. Witnessing a night of performance as such, it underlies the risk that they take with their programming that gives such great and contrasting nights of performance and experience to tall involved.

Website: www.gracespace.multiply.com

Press Release:

FRANCIS O'SHAUGNESSY (Montreal), SARAH LETOURNEAU (Quebec) & DAVID BOYLAN (NYC)
Both Francis and David use everyday objects in new ways - they use these objects as characters in their actions, in new and unusual projects

THURSDAY, MARCH 8
8:00 PM
~free admission / free wine & beer ~

Francis O'Shaughnessy (Montreal/Chicoutimi,Canada)
Francis O'Shaughnessy has participated in more than 50 festivals and events, including: Indonesia, Philippines, Portugal, Spain, France, Poland, Ireland, the United States and Québec/Canada. He was a curator of a round of performance in four cities on the peninsula Ibérienne [2005], Co-curator of the festival de la nouvelle performance de Chicoutimi at Le Lieu, Centre en Art Actuel, in Quebec [2005] and of the International Festival: Contextual Art/ The Differences in Poland [2006]. For the magazine Inter, Art Actuel, he wrote an article entitled: L’art actuel en Indonésie [2005]. From Quebec, he currently lives and works in Chicoutimi. www.peianomade.skyblog.com

Sara Létourneau (Chicoutimi,Canada)
A student at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi, my interventions are between painting, sound, performance and installation. I hybrid these practices through projects of attitudes and behaviors. Narrowly connected to my corporality and the multiple bodies, this production is sensitized and personalized through a network of relational interventions orchestrated by myself. The heritage, the family bonds and the inters relations are my principal subjects of current exploration. – S. Letourneau

David Boylan (Brooklyn, NY)
APOCALOFT; FLOORBENCH
An Interactive presentation and demonstration of FLOORBENCH - a new design-object from APOCALOFT - by David Bodhi Boylan, founder and CEO
FLOORBENCH is a self-explanatory title that offers two immediate functions, a place to stand and a place to sit. However, FLOORBENCH is the definition of versatility. In this multi-media presentation, viewers will work together with the designer and each other to explore the myriad functions and possibilities for this exciting new object.
David B. Boylans’ work straddles the genres of installation and performance. He graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Boston, MA [2005] and now lives and works in Bushwick, Brooklyn

Sasha Bezzubov - Things Fall Apart, Front Room Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2007-03-05T10:33:00.000-05:00

On view at Front Room Gallery in Williamsburg, is an eye-splitting new solo show of photography by Sasha Bezzubov entitled "Things Fall Apart."

Populating the eye with visions of human detritus, natural carnage and empty destruction, the Bezzubov's images are all formed from the remains of natural disasters from around the world. Entering these images is at once a consuming and surreal experience, as the focus tends to be on the humanless spaces once ripe with activity but now barren as the world has seen fit. The evidence of human life is a scar in these environments; rotting cars, destroyed homes, and concrete waves of broken streets. The lavishness of the presentation and formal mastership of the photographs produce unforgettable images that slip into the ether of the mind. One could think these were set up and photographed after a large Hollywood production without the accompanying artist statement.

The works have a definite weight beyond their concept, tackling our very existence versus an uncontrollable nature, an often cruel and intolerant force in life. The suffering and resilance of the victims is beneath their own ruins. One particular image is of an Indian town after an earthquake; the few inhabitants (absent from other photos) are processing daily life among their village in ruins, walking and riding through what is left because they have to. Nature's choice has been against them, but through this act they must continue on for it is the only way to survive. Transcendant, uncompromising and beautiful, Bezzubov's images encapsulate a realm in the reality of existence that art's expression was made for. Landscape photography at it's best.

PRESS RELEASE FROM THE GALLERY:

The Front Room Presents: Things Fall Apart by Sasha Bezzubov

Friday February 23th - March 25th - Viewing hours: Fri-Sun 1-6 and by appointment

"It is thus that we are warned at each step of our nothingness, man goes to meditate on the ruins of emptiness, he forgets that he himself is a ruin still more unsteady, and that he will fall before these remains do"
—Chateaubriand

Looking at ruins has a long cultural history, particularly in poetry and painting. Traditionally, the contemplation of ruins signified the contemplation of mortality — both of the society and of the self. Starting in the 17th century, the Grand Tourists visited the ruins of former civilizations to be reminded that even the mightiest of empires would eventually become "time’s shipwreck". If the seemingly indestructible stone buildings of ancient Rome succumbed to armies, natural disasters and decay, why wouldn’t they? Witnessing the destruction of cities and the wreckage of our built environments, we too are reminded that we, and everything we’ve created, are transitory and impermanent.

As the name indicates, a natural disaster is a normal occurrence, a standard way that the earth regulates itself. However, because of our unprecedented impact on the environment, these events have become catastrophically severe, frequent and deadly. As the systems that cause the earth to warm continue to affect each other, the feedback loops they create may render the decline irreversible. The presence of the ruins left in the wake of these disasters may become less of an exception than the rule.

Things Fall Apart (2001-present) is a series of photographs of destruction caused by natural disasters in India, the US, Indonesia and Thailand. Using the genre of landscape photography, a tradition born with and employed to celebrate industrial expansion, these photographs evidence the fragility of the man-made as it is transformed into dreamscapes of apocalyptic proportions. We derive a guilty pleasure from witnessing and representing ruins. Images of destruction are beautiful because there is pleasure in knowing a kind of truth, the truth of fragility and impermanence. But there is suffering buried in these images, the suffering of others, and by extension, of ourselves.

Website: www.frontroom.org

RECCOMENDED!

Mission Statement

2007-03-05T10:27:00.000-05:00

This blog is meant for the disscussion of art, practice and theory through the looking glass of an actionist (aka performance artist).